Quotes
From Summa Bergania
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Quotes used in email signatures
A Christian told me, "I cannot be perfect; it is hopeless; and God does not expect it."
It would be more honest if he had said, "I do not want to be perfect: I am content to be saved." Such as he do not care for being perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect, but merely for being what they call 'saved'.
—George MacDonald (Unspoken Sermons II, paraphrased) [12/2/06 - present]
"I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?"
"For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment..."
—C. S. Lewis (The Great Divorce) [11/3/03 - 12/2/06]
Do you see someone who is hasty in speech? There is more hope for a fool than for anyone like that.
—Solomon [9/25/03 - 11/3/03]
"I do not have to think, I have plenty of meat."
—The response from an Eskimo when asked "Of what are you thinking?" [8/5/03 - 9/25/03]
Better is one handful with peace, than two handfuls with strife.
—Solomon (Ecclesiastes 4, paraphrased) [6/22/03 - 8/5/03]
Be agreeable to everyone, but develop further friendship with wise people.
—Confucius [5/30/03 - 6/22/03]
Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.
—Martin Luther [4/26/03 - 5/30/03]
One who gives an honest answer gives a kiss on the lips.
—Solomon [3/16/03 - 4/26/03]
For those who try to find joy in things outside themselves easily vanish away into emptiness. They waste themselves on the temporal pleasures of the visible world. Their minds are starved and they nibble at empty shadows.
—St. Augustine [2/17/03 - 3/16/03]
Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.
—Lao Tzu [1/13/03 - 2/17/03]
We become what we behold... We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
—Marshall McLuhan [12/16/02 - 1/13/03]
Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to happen, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.
—Epictetus [11/17/02 - 12/16/02]
Their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made.
—Isaiah [10/18/02 - 11/13/02]
And the seed sown among the thorns represents the people who hear the message and go on their way, and with the worries and riches and pleasures of living, the life is choked out of them, and in the end they produce nothing.
—Jesus (Luke 6, paraphrased) [9/23/02 - 10/16/02]
Therefore the wise person acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything.
—Lao Tzu [8/14/02 - 9/20/02]
A rebuke strikes deeper into a discerning person than a hundred blows into a fool.
—Solomon [4/9/02 - 8/13/02]
A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing personal opinion.
—Solomon [11/18/01 - 3/21/02]
Truth, you see, can never be refuted.
—Socrates [9/19/01 - 10/15/01]
Rebuke a fool and you make an enemy; rebuke a wise man and you make a friend.
—Solomon [8/18/00 - 2/23/01]
If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true ...and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
—J. B. S. Haldane (Possible Worlds) [7/12/00 - 7/21/00]
Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophize, cities will have no rest from evils, nor will the human race.
—Socrates (Republic V--473c) [1/25/00 - 6/5/00]
There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.
—Socrates [12/8/99 - 1/19/00]
I prefer nothing unless it is true.
—Socrates [8/11/98 - 11/23/99]
Enlighten the people generally... most of all, in matters of government and religion; and that the diffusion of knowledge among the people is to be the instrument by which it is effected.
—Thomas Jefferson [10/15/97 - 10/28/97]
I know not how the third World War will be fought, but the fourth will be with sticks and stones.
—Albert Einstein [8/27/97]
If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved.
—C. S. Lewis [8/15/97]
Other quotes
Certainty
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
—Will Durant (attributed)
Epistemology
It is impossible that our rational part should be other than spiritual; and if any one maintain that we are simply corporeal, this would far more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is impossible to imagine how it should know itself.
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées
It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.
—John B.S. Haldane, “When I Am Dead”, Possible Worlds: And Other Essays
Mechanism, like all material systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge. If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?
—C.S. Lewis (Essay titled "Evil and God" contained in the collection God in the Dock)
Faith
It is the Lord GOD who helps me; who will declare me guilty?
—Isaiah 50.9
In every person suffering from hatred and violence, or rejected by selfishness and indifference, Christ continues to suffer and die. On the faces of those who have been 'defeated by life' there appear the features of the face of Christ dying on the Cross.
—Pope John Paul II
Without Christ I was like a fish out of water. With Christ I am in the ocean of love.
—Sadhu Sundar Singh
Free Will
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Industry
Never a day without a line. (Nulla dies sine linea)
—Apelles (ancient Greek artist, the saying is related to us by Pliny)
A story to motivate a salesperson:
There were two vultures sitting on a tree. One got hungry, turned to the other and said, "Wait? Hell, I'm going to go kill something."
Influence
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Islam
But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse.
—Voltaire (Letter to Frederick II)
Jesus
There was about this time a wise man named Jesus—if it is lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works—a teacher of the type of men who enjoy hearing the truth. He drew many of the Jews and Gentiles to him; he was the Christ. When Pilate, at the suggestion of the Jewish leaders, condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold, along with many other wonderful things concerning him. The tribe of Christians named for him still exists today.
—Josephus (Thrones of Blood)
Logic
The only way absolutes can be ruled out is by invoking one.
—"SteveB" (comment from the uncommondescent blog)
Mammon
But the rich man then began to scratch his head and it [the saying] pleased him not. And the Lord said to him: How canst thou say, I have fulfilled the law and the prophets? For it stands written in the law: Love thy neighbor as thyself; and behold, many of thy brethren, sons of Abraham, are begrimed with dirt and die of hunger and thy house is full of many good things and nothing at all comes forth from it to them!
—Gospel of the Nazaraens (early 2nd century); embellishment in the story of the rich young ruler
It's easy to be independent when you've got money. But to be independent when you haven't got a thing -- that's the Lord's test.
—Mahalia Jackson
Of course, a person doesn't have to lose everything to acquire spiritual wealth. But one does need to understand that material possessions and status don't constitute real well-being. They don't constitute real security, either. These come from God alone.
—Author Unknown, 'To Be Really Rich' from 'The Christian Science Monitor'
I think that a person who is attached to riches, who lives with the worry of riches, is actually very poor. However, if such a person puts her money at the service of others, then she is rich, very rich.
—Mother Teresa, 'Mother Teresa: No Greater Love'
Patience
Ceremony forces a person to slow down, and as many of us live at a frenzied pace, encountering monastic prayer, or a traditional monastic meal--eaten in silence while a passage from scripture or a religious book is read aloud--can feel like skidding to a halt.
—Kathleen Norris, 'The Cloister Walk'
Persepective
An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
—G.K. Chesterton
I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.
—Frank A. Clark
A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.
—President R. M. Nixon
Priorities
It is a good thing to let prayer be the first business of the morning and the last at night.
—Martin Luther, from "A Simple Way to Pray"
An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
—Henry David Thoreau
Scripture
I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this book upon reason that you can and the balance by faith, and you will live and die a better man.
—Abraham Lincoln
But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays the claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to Him.
—George MacDonald (Unspoken Sermons, First Series, The Consuming Fire, 1867)
Both the serpent and the fig were probably phallic symbols; behind the myth is the thought that sex and knowledge destroy innocence and happiness, and are the origin of evil; we shall find this same idea at the end of the Old Testament in Ecclesiastes as here at the beginning.
—Will Durant (Our Oriental Heritage, chapter 12, 1935)
To ask whether these stories are true or false, whether they "really happened," would be to put a trivial and superficial question; their substance, of course, is not the tales they tell but the judgments they convey. Meanwhile, it would be unwise not to enjoy their disarming simplicity, and the vivid swiftness of their narratives.
—Will Durant, commenting on the stories of the garden of Eden and Noah (Our Oriental Heritage, chapter 12, 1935)
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1.7]
—St. Augustine, "De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim" (The Literal Meaning of Genesis) Book 12 (excerpt)
Surrender
Three prayers for three different kinds of souls: The First Soul prays: "I am a bow in your hands, Lord. Draw me, lest I rot." The Second Soul prays: "Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break." And the Third Soul prays: "Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!"
—Nikos Kazantzakis (Report to Greco)
Wisdom
Legalists never understand people of grace.
—Chuck Swindoll "Getting Through the Tough Stuff" - 'Misunderstanding'
A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility.
—C.S. Lewis
A humble man is not disturbed by praise. Since he is no longer concerned with himself, and since he knows where the good that is in him comes from, he does not refuse praise, because it belongs to the God he loves, and in receiving it he keeps nothing for himself but gives it all, with great joy, to his God.
—Thomas Merton, 'Seeds of Contemplation'
Christians and camels receive their burdens kneeling.
—Ambrose Bierce
Blind is the bookless man.
—Icelandic Proverb
Witness
Preach the Gospel always; and when necessary, use words.
—Attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi
He gives most who gives with joy.
—Mother Teresa, 'My Life for the Poor'
The best way to show our gratitude to God and the people is to accept everything with joy.
—Mother Teresa, 'My Life for the Poor'
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God... go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body....
—Walt Whitman (Preface to Leaves of Grass)
Love is the virtue of the Heart; Sincerity the virtue of the Mind; Courage the virtue of the Spirit; Decision the virtue of the Will.
—The Organic Commandments (1940) by Frank Lloyd Wright
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
—T. S. Eliot (Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton)
Obedience is the fruit of faith; patience, the bloom on the fruit.
—Christina Rosetti, 'Streams in the Desert'
There's a problem with Thanksgiving. Celebrating an "official" day . . . compartmentalizes gratitude. The truth is that gratitude is the right attitude every day. Scripture declares, "Let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise" (Hebrews 13:15). To retain the spirit of Thanksgiving Day throughout the year, we need to express daily gratitude for the pleasures, courtesies and blessings that constantly come to us.
—Victor M. Parachin, 'Talking turkey about Thanksgiving,' The Lutheran
